This article appears in the August 2025 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here.
Photos by Gonzalo Guzman
GARY, INDIANA – Driving through Northwest Indiana feels a bit like going back in time. Winding roads, barns, and lush green fields in the rural farm communities give way to hulking steel mills, tall smokestacks, massive warehouses, and art deco movie palaces as you hit Gary. Look a little closer, though, and the ’50s ideal of country life leading into the big city becomes hazier. The movie palace, home of the 2002 Miss USA pageant (run by an impresario named Donald Trump), is boarded up, the windows broken. The jobs, or at least most of them, are gone, along with many of the people who worked at them.
Many of those in this region rely on government aid in some way, whether it be farm subsidies or social safety net benefits like Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP. In Indiana, 1 out of every 11 residents receives SNAP benefits. The state’s staunchly Republican government has made a practice of canceling or defunding safety-net programs, but this year there was a twist. In April, Gov. Mike Braun allied himself with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Make America Healthy Again agenda, signing nine executive orders for the Make Indiana Healthy Again initiative.
One of those executive orders empowered the state to submit a waiver request to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), asking for authorization to restrict what low-income Hoosiers who receive SNAP benefits can purchase. In May, USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins approved the waiver. Starting in January, SNAP recipients in Indiana won’t be able to use SNAP to buy candy or sugary drinks like soda and some juices.
So far, Indiana is one of six states that have been approved by the USDA to ban sugary foods from SNAP, but experts say that they’re monitoring at least eight others that might follow suit. Earlier this year, eight House Republicans introduced a bill that would do the same thing.
The move is a complicated one, as are so many of the policies that make up the MAHA agenda. It’s true that sugary foods can have quasi-addictive properties and put consumers at risk for chronic illnesses like diabetes. It’s true that Americans, particularly low-income Americans, have high rates of these food-related chronic illnesses. Ideally, we would have a food system that prioritizes fresh fruits and vegetables over candy bars and sodas.
But SNAP advocates say we don’t live in that world, and further limiting what low-income Americans can buy won’t help get us any closer. And instead of just restricting people to healthy food, the moves in red states could restrict people from finding somewhere to use their SNAP benefits altogether.
It’s also especially difficult to trust Braun, RFK Jr., and other politicians aligned with the Trump administration, after half a year of relentless cuts to the same social safety net programs that are designed to maintain and promote Americans’ health. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, Trump’s landmark spending package passed in July, cuts $186 billion from SNAP. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimates that as many as five million people could lose SNAP benefits. In the same bill, Republicans plan to cut nearly $1 trillion from Medicaid, a move that would make health care unaffordable for many of these same Americans and decimate rural hospital systems.
Braun has done his fair share of cuts in Indiana, too. After just one year of participating in the federal government’s SUN Bucks program, which gives low-income families with children $120 to buy groceries during the summer, Braun declined to renew the program for this summer. A statement from Indiana’s Family and Social Services Administration didn’t offer a clear explanation, just saying that “necessary groundwork had not been completed” to run the program. The cancellation will leave 700,000 Indiana children hungrier than they were last summer.
Are these the people who will make Indiana, and America, healthy again? Or does this fervor to ban sugary foods from SNAP have an ulterior motive?
AS I DROVE TO THE FARMHOUSE THAT SERVES as the base of operations for the Northwest Indiana Food Council, I was struck by the abundance of food that I saw—fields overflowing with rows of corn, small patches of leafy greens, private greenhouses here and there. But when I spoke to Anne Massie and Becca Tuholski, two farmers and leaders of the Council, they told me that the plenty I saw didn’t translate to the tables of ordinary people in the region.
The Council was formed in 2015 to address both the economic security of local farmers and the food insecurity of folks in the region. According to Massie, the organization’s president, and Tuholski, the local food access coordinator, the two issues are closely linked.
“You can drive for miles and miles and miles and just be surrounded by corn and soybeans, but there’s not a grocery store in sight,” said Tuholski. “We’re surrounded by food, but it’s not food for us.”
Those corn and soy crops are typically processed into animal feed or turned into ingredients like corn syrup, which then is used to make the same cheap, sweet, ultra-processed foods that end up on corner-store shelves in Gary’s food deserts: bottles of Coke, Hershey’s bars, tubs of ice cream.
“When we are just subsidizing commodity crops that are turned into sweeteners and processed foods, those are … sometimes the only options in communities where shelf-stable food is all that they have access to,” said Massie. “We would like to see more effort on making healthy food more affordable.”
Instead of just restricting people to healthy food, red states could restrict people from finding somewhere to use their SNAP benefits altogether.
Before reaching Gary, I stopped in East Chicago, Indiana, a town of 25,000 where a quarter of the population lives below the poverty line. Until 1985, the area was the site of multiple lead smelting facilities; studies have found elevated levels of lead and arsenic in East Chicago’s soil, as well as high lead levels in some residents’ water. Despite the environmental hazards left behind by industry, the town is beautiful, with red-brick storefronts, foxgloves blooming in front yards, and flower pots hanging from lampposts.
The closest major grocery store, an Aldi, is in the next town over, so many East Chicago residents rely on local mom-and-pop grocers. One such shop is Fuerte Meat Market, a Hispanic food shop on one of the main streets. I spoke to the store manager, Bartolo Fuerte, who told me that 60 to 65 percent of his customers pay for their groceries with SNAP, especially between the 5th and 23rd of the month, when Indiana sends out SNAP payments. Fuerte said that customers who use SNAP typically buy a variety of foods: meat from his butcher counter, produce, but also soda (“pop,” to many in the region) and candy.
As for Indiana’s ban on buying sugary drinks and candy with SNAP dollars, Fuerte was a supporter. “It’s bad for my business, but it’s good for people,” he said. “Soda is like drinking liquor, almost.”
The comparison to alcohol is one that many proponents of the plan echo. SNAP has never allowed the purchase of alcohol, tobacco, or cannabis products. Some, like Laura Schmidt, a professor at the Institute for Health Policy Studies at the University of California San Francisco School of Medicine, argue that soda should be in that same category. Schmidt wrote in an op-ed that ultra-processed and sugary foods share the addictive qualities of alcohol and tobacco. They were designed to get consumers hooked; in fact, many food producers like Kraft and General Foods were at one time owned by the same tobacco companies that got generations of Americans addicted to cigarettes. To protect consumers from corporate greed, she argues, the government should step in.
Fuerte predicts that the ban will affect his bottom line but again emphasized that the community’s health is his priority: “Whatever the government does for the people, for their health, I have to support it.”
BUT EXPERTS SAY THAT THE BAN COULD MAKE food insecurity worse by burdening small grocers with new administrative protocols and lower revenues. “We’re talking about the mom-and-pop retailers who are the only entity standing between 90 miles and food,” said Gina Plata-Nino, a food advocate with the Food Research & Action Center. She predicts that some retailers won’t want to update their systems to accommodate the SNAP changes and may stop accepting SNAP benefits altogether. “It’s incredibly expensive. It’s restricting. Expensive for the states to figure out, expensive for the retailers, and the outcome will be that [fewer grocers] will want to be on the program,” she explained.
The USDA has blocked SNAP cuts on this basis before. In 2010, New York City under then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg tried to implement a ban on sugary drinks for SNAP recipients. The USDA denied New York City’s request, writing that it would be too complex for retailers to implement. “The proposal lacks a clear and practical means to determine product eligibility, which is essential to avoid retailer confusion at point-of-sale and stigma for affected clients,” the USDA’s letter said.
These issues, unsolved and prohibitive in 2010, remain today. Among the six states with approved waivers, there are restrictions on “soda,” “soft drinks,” “energy drinks,” “candy,” and simply “unhealthy drinks.” The descriptions are not consistent, and at the federal level there is no definitive USDA definition of a “sugary” food. This leaves all kinds of things up to interpretation. Do sports drinks like Gatorade count as “unhealthy drinks”? What about energy drinks or vitamin waters? At what point does fruit juice move from being healthy to unhealthy? Should fruit roll-ups be considered candy? What about chocolate-covered almonds? How many grams of added sugar makes something “sugary”? Though some states have gone into more detail, most haven’t, leaving these questions unanswered.
Without clear definitions and easy point-of-sale protocols, retailers could be forced to police each customer’s purchase, potentially in front of other customers. For some SNAP recipients, the benefits already carry enough stigma. “Part of the reason that people don’t want to be on SNAP is because of the stigmatizing barriers and judgments,” said Plata-Nino. “It’s the reason why people shop at midnight.”
FUERTE MEAT MARKET ALSO SERVES HOT FOOD, with well-priced tacos, tortas, and burritos in a corner by the front registers. But SNAP recipients can’t use their benefits on hot prepared foods, including products like rotisserie chickens. Arkansas Republican Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who also banned sugary foods from her state’s SNAP program, said when she announced the ban: “Right now you can use food stamps to buy a soft drink or candy bar from a gas station, but you can’t use them to buy an Arkansas-raised hot rotisserie chicken from a grocery store. That’s the definition of crazy.”
To hear Sanders tell it, the addition of rotisserie chicken would help counteract the subtraction of sugary foods from SNAP eligibility. But hot foods like rotisserie chicken weren’t mentioned in the waiver request Sanders sent to the USDA, and USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins only approved the cuts to sugary foods. When the waiver takes effect in January 2026, Arkansas residents still won’t be able to buy hot foods, despite how Sanders sold it.
SNAP advocates like Joelle Johnson of the Center for Science in the Public Interest say that this pattern of only subtracting from SNAP rather than adding to it betrays Republicans’ true intentions. “If the administration actually wanted to achieve those things—reducing health disparities and reducing diet-related chronic disease—then we should be seeing language around protecting SNAP benefits, increasing SNAP benefits, making sure that people can afford to buy groceries,” she said.
MOST OF GARY IS CLASSIFIED AS A FOOD DESERT by the USDA. Every few miles, there’s a Family Dollar or small corner store, but few with fresh fruit or produce. I stopped in a number of these small grocers, trying to get a sense for the community’s options. In one, 5th Plaza Food Mart & Beauty Supply, the only produce options were a watermelon, two avocados, and two lemons sitting on the grimy bottom shelf of a refrigerator.
Those who live in Gary know this already. I sat down with local advocates Carl Weatherspoon Jr., the vice chair of the Gary Food Council, and Tiara Williams, who helps run a block beautification initiative for the city. Both Weatherspoon and Williams were born and raised in the city, and we spent a fair chunk of our conversation comparing local grocery options.
“So you’ll have a grocery store here, and you can see that that grocery store is not offering fresh items, and it smells like a pig was slaughtered six days ago right here at the register. Now why is it that way here, but not when you go to [nearby towns] Merrillville or Schererville or Crown Point?” asked Williams wryly. “There’s a common denominator, but I can’t quite put my finger on it.”
Williams was not so subtly referring to race, and its interwoven relationship with poverty. In the 2020 census, around 80 percent of Gary’s residents were Black, compared to 50 percent in Merrillville and just 7 percent in Crown Point (racial census data wasn’t available for Schererville in 2020). In Gary, 27 percent of Black residents are food insecure.
“We’re targeting and beating up a very vulnerable population.” – Gina Plata-Nino, Food Research & Action Center
After decades of being left behind, community activists and workers in Gary, like Weatherspoon and Williams, have long abandoned the hope that the government will act in the best interest of their health, opting instead to take matters into their own hands. The three of us sat perched on stumps in Gary’s Mystical Farms, a city grant–funded garden built on a vacant lot in a residential neighborhood. We ate calendula flowers (spicy, then sweet), peppermint leaves (cooling), and hibiscus tea that helped mitigate the 90-degree heat and thick humidity. During the hour we sat there, neighbors stopped by to chat; it was clear that the garden was a local gathering place in addition to a spot where residents could harvest free, healthy fruits and vegetables.
“My grandfather had a garden. His grandmother had a garden,” Williams told me, pointing to Weatherspoon. “And that has to do with a lot of our people coming from the South and understanding that you do need to garden. You need to be responsible for your own food, and that’s what they did.”
Williams’s grandfather came to Gary from the South as part of the Great Migration, leaving life as a sharecropper who picked cotton and was kept constantly in debt by landlords. He brought with him a commitment to growing his own food and, according to Williams, was known to drop off greens and tomatoes to his neighbors. “It’s an art that has been lost, unfortunately, but through things like community gardens, where people are willing to educate, the community feels comfortable to come back,” she said.
The hope is that, by building a connection to the land, Gary residents will regain sovereignty over their food ecosystem, eliminating reliance on corner stores and SNAP rules. They’re already seeing progress. “Mr. John across the street, he’ll come over here and get a cucumber or tomato,” said Weatherspoon. “He from Mississippi, he has a garden. Miss Betty and Tia, her granddaughter, they’ll walk down the street and make some cha cha with our hot peppers. It’s delicious. They don’t go to the grocery store.”
When I asked Williams and Weatherspoon what they thought about the sugary foods ban, I wasn’t quite sure what they’d say. They are both so deeply connected to the foods they grow and eat, and adamant about the benefits of eating healthfully. But they both immediately saw the ban as paternalism from people who don’t have the best interest of low-income Hoosiers at heart.
“What do I think about the government regulating what people eat when there is nothing really here to replace it? Well, that’s an injustice in itself,” Williams said. “If you’re not going to address those types of issues, I think punishing the person who receives the SNAP benefits is not the way.”
BACK IN EAST CHICAGO, I SPOKE TO CECE CRUZ, the owner of Broadway Food Shop, a hole-in-the-wall grocer just two blocks away from Fuerte Meat Market. Outside the shop’s front door, an AC unit dripped water into a bucket, working hard against the summer heat.
Cruz’s inventory is mostly dry goods, like beans, pasta, and bread. There’s a small, refrigerated soda section and an even smaller produce section. Cruz, who has owned the shop for 47 years, told me that some 80 percent of her customers use SNAP. Many of them are single mothers, she said: “They struggle through the month once they get their food stamps and buy what they can.” She often overhears their children asking for candy bars or ice cream. “That’s their treat,” she said. “So you’re going to just take their treat away?”
Though she acknowledged that the ban would likely affect her revenue, she wasn’t terribly worried. She knows that her customers will still need to buy basics like bread and milk and, besides, she feels powerless to change the policy: “We have to go with it. We have no other choice.”
Like Cruz, Plata-Nino is concerned that the policy beats up on those who need the most help, like single mothers trying to feed their children. “We are targeting and beating up at a very vulnerable population. [Sugar consumption] is an issue for all of America,” she said. “Why are you targeting a population that doesn’t have a seat on Capitol Hill?”
It’s true that sugar consumption is not unique to SNAP recipients. Data about what SNAP recipients eat is notoriously difficult to collect; purchasing data is private to grocers. The definitive study on how SNAP recipients eat used data from 2011 and found that “there were no major differences in the expenditure patterns of SNAP and non-SNAP households.” SNAP recipients spent most of their money on meat, poultry, and seafood, and the next biggest category was sweetened beverages. For non-SNAP consumers, sweetened beverages were the fifth-largest category. SNAP households spend 9 percent of their benefits on sweetened beverages, and non-SNAP households spend 7 percent.
Other studies have analyzed how a sugary drink ban could change diabetes and obesity rates. One simulation found that the prevalence of Type 2 diabetes among SNAP recipients could decline by 240,000 people over ten years if the ban were implemented. And sugar consumption is clearly linked to several health problems besides Type 2 diabetes, like heart disease, cavities, and gout.
The SNAP advocates I spoke to don’t deny that excess sugar consumption is harmful; they just disagree that bans like Indiana’s are the right approach to fix it. “There’s a right way to do it and a wrong way to do it,” Johnson said. “I would love to see waiver requests from states where they’re proposing to design a research pilot that pairs a fruit and vegetable incentive with a sugary beverage disincentive.”
Schmidt, the UCSF sugar researcher, also proposed using savings from the sugar cuts to fund fruit and vegetable incentives, tackling the affordability crisis that keeps many SNAP recipients from eating healthier. Indiana started their fruit and vegetable incentive program, Double Up, in 2020, allowing SNAP recipients to get an extra dollar for every dollar they spend on produce at some retailers and farmers markets, up to $20 per day. I asked Braun’s office whether they planned to expand Double Up alongside their recent cuts, but they declined to respond. Double Up wasn’t mentioned in any of Braun’s Make Indiana Healthy Again executive orders or press conferences.
Massie, the farmer and Food Council leader, wants farmers to sell more produce and Hoosiers to eat more produce—she’s devoted her career to it, after all. But after months of nothing but cuts from both the Trump administration and the state, she’s lost all trust in Indiana to act in the best interest of the community.
She described how the Council had recently made major headway in supporting farmers and low-income residents. The Council had administered the Local Food for Schools Program and the Local Food Purchasing Assistance Program, both of which were USDA grant–funded. The initiatives connected Indiana farmers to lower-income residents through their schools and food banks, raising revenue for farmers and providing nutrition to community members.
The Local Food for Schools Program had brought $1.4 million in revenue for local farmers over just two years. But on March 10, Massie and Tuholski got the news that both programs had been slashed by the federal government. Farmers found out abruptly. Some had already purchased extra materials to prepare for the increased demand from the programs.
From Anne’s front porch, we looked out over the neighboring farms and her own greenhouses, which had just started to yield the season’s first peppers and tomatoes. She seemed angry, or sad, probably both.
“What’s the proactive side of Make America Healthy Again? What’s the proactive side of Make Indiana Healthy Again?” she wondered. “Because all we’re seeing are cuts and rollbacks.”
This article appears in Aug 2025 Issue.